Your mouse will give you up

I’m a very private person or maybe I just pretend to be but then who cares. In fact it’s so bad that most of my shady friends have NDA clauses by default (if you have such with me, now you know how you are internally classified). Ok, enough rambling.

To imagine that my computer could easily give me up, I mean my emotions, to random people is really pathetic.

While SEOs have always analyzed heat maps showing where mice love to play on a web page, this is the first time it’s being analyzed for the emotions of the users holding the input devices.

Like everything technology, it can be used for good and evil.

The Good

Banks, websites, 4Chan, Nairaland, etc. can track your mouse movements to determine if the pages are relevant, or just annoying. Take that mouse feeds from many visitors and you have a large data set to optimize from.

Systems may be able to know if you need assistance and push help/chat to you right away. Hi Visitor, do you want to know how doh dah works?

The Bad

Google and others may be able to develop advanced algorithms that can turn mouse movements into digital motional fingerprints to identify users. Could be used to authenticate or, em, deliver relevant ads.

Website or news could use it to filter news and content. Serve this for angry guys or that for loving lasses.

The Ugly

NSA may use that to track you around. Know everywhere you go, what you read and maybe one day just hack your brain.

The Salvation

I’m cock sure someone is going to have a software or system that can abstract or smoothen out mouse movements into an anonymous mess without sacrificing usability and then we patiently wait for the next hack.

The Beautiful

Tell a website visitor it’s a beautiful sunny day out there, don’t just read the news.